Sacrament of Life

90% will lurk and read and learn; 9% will chip in; 1% will make most of the posts.

We created this forum for the 90%, and the 1% if they think hard should see themselves as serving these others, bringing light to darkness through darkness and light joined as one process.

We created this forum in the spirit of metal.

Metal is, like all things that affirm life by connecting death and life, a sacrament of life. Metal is here to make life more real, and by eliminating illusion and substituting a spirit of vir that embraces the life-process death and all, to make life more worth living.

If you talk to your favorite metal musicians, they'll tell you this, although in different languages. Paul Speckmann told me this in essence in one language; Trey Azagthoth used another; Ildjarn and Quorthon told me similar things in interviews. There is a belief to this genre and we believe in it because it makes our lives better by making our minds clearer.

This is the essence of nihilism, if you cut through the chatter: nothing inherently means anything except reality itself. Like Zen, it is a slayer of the illusion formed by self-referential things, that the reference is the thing itself. There is no thing in itself. There is one thing. It is interconnected and nihilism is our language for removing our illusions about it, whether in language, in the lie of visual appearance, in the duplicity of emotions, or even in the erroneous filter of socialization.

Nihilism is reaching for reality. It is not nothing, because nothing cannot exist without a something to indicate a contraposition in nothingness.

A billion or more metaphors could describe nihilism. I have one: the taylor.

When you make a suit of clothes, you are attempting to design something to contain a person, just as when you write a philosophy, you're trying to encapsulate reality and give it meaning. You want to make the suit fit the curves and angles and bulges of that person (for some people, might as well use a tent) but you don't want to crush that frontier of free motion that's necessary for variation, for chance and change, for choice.

I think many want to turn this into something negative. Either they want to talk about themselves, or they want an excuse to give up on life and pleasure themselves with hollow joys. Those are easy states of being. They have no struggle in them. But if you wallow in such states, life passes you by.

We are here in a religious capacity: we fucking love life and we love nature and the reality that it creates (the universe, somethingness, invented itself). We do not struggle to make the kingdom of God on earth. We struggle to make the design of life increase in complexity and beauty. Because we are nihilists, we can accept this without moral hangups.

Our goal here is to celebrate the beauty of life, the sacrament of life, that is metal. You no longer need to pose, or to hide yourself, or to fear social censure: it is nothing. Be anonymous. But, even as you are disguised, be yourself. Deep inside of you is a will toward life and a will toward realism as a means toward better life, and by that I do not mean in quantity but quality of being. This is the ultimate idea of metal.

The posing, neurotic self-critique, contrarianism et al are contraproductive and if you think about it, reflective of someone who has not thought enough about what they want to do. At this forum, we do not tell you what to think; we offer knowledge. We do not censor opposing viewpoints (although we destroy destructive messages designed to disrupt organic growth, whoever they agree with). This is a space that can be used to affirm life, or to affirm substitutes for life, and we suggest the former.

Everything else is crap for people who are afraid to fucking live, and I am unsure why anyone would want to substitute dying for living, unless they lost hope in themselves long ago and want to drag others into that entropy. I am not telling you what to think. I'm telling you reality as I (and others) have seen it.

The rest is up to you. Instead of flogging the same sad topics in a reactionary sense, maybe branch out, even do some of your own research, and bring to this place ideas that others might enjoy reading about and learn from. The world really isn't bad. Yes, humans are fucking up and about to eliminate most of themselves, but we're already busy building the next empire.

Why? Because we love life. Metal does, too. Nothing is everything, because life is an the interconnection of everything. Praise it, through metal, and leave your fears at the door, for your own sake as well as the sake of everything else.